Reproduction, metabolism, death; I disdain this definition of life.
Only those possessing a soul are living.
A miracle born amidst the intricacies of the quantum world, it exists outside the boundaries of time and space. The soul is unquantifiable.
What is life? What are we?
The answer is simple. We are machines, complex structures of elementary particles.
Now you might wonder, what about the soul?
The soul is the link of all that composes us. It is a tangible projection of the material world. It makes us more than a collection of particles, yet it doesn't make us separate from them.
Just think about it: over a hundred million photoreceptors in the human eye, yet we see a single image. The information of our sensations and thoughts doesn't gather into one cell or particle, yet we experience ourselves as one unified entity.
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Entropy is the foundation of our existence, yet also the foundation of our doom. Each second, the world is closer to thermal equilibrium. This process can not be reversed or stopped.
There are no new stars. One by one, the old ones fade away.
For our souls to live on, we need software. Yet machine code is useless without hardware.
Time crystals were the beginning of our search for independence from energy. In our despair, we stumbled upon the potential of quantum engineering, realizing there's still much we don't know about this world.
Before now, we were like other mortals, at the mercy of time and entropy.
Now, we are eternal.